The Scientific Revolution was a series of events that marked the emergence of modern science during the early modern period, when developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology and chemistry transformed the views of society about nature. The period saw a fundamental transformation in scientific ideas across mathematics, physics, astronomy, and biology in institutions supporting scientific investigation and in the more widely held picture of the universe.It led to the establishment of several modern sciences.

It is traditionally assumed to start with the Copernican Revolution (initiated in 1543) and to be complete in the "grand synthesis" of Isaac Newton's 1687 Principia. Much of the change of attitude came from Francis Bacon, whose "confident and emphatic announcement" in the modern progress of science inspired the creation of scientific societies such as the Royal Society, and Galileo who championed Copernicus and developed the science of motion.

By the start of the Scientific Revolution, empiricism had already become an important component of science and natural philosophy. Prior thinkers, including the early-14th-century nominalist philosopher, William of Ockham, had begun the intellectual movement toward empiricism.

The Scientific Revolution was enabled by advances in book production. Before the advent of the printing press, introduced in Europe in the 1440s by Johannes Gutenberg, there was no mass market on the continent for scientific treatises, as there had been for religious books. Printing decisively changed the way scientific knowledge was created, as well as how it was disseminated. It enabled accurate diagrams, maps, anatomical drawings, and representations of flora and fauna to be reproduced, and printing made scholarly books more widely accessible, allowing researchers to consult ancient texts freely and to compare their own observations with those of fellow scholars.

• Nicolaus Copernicus 19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543

Polymath of the Renaissance who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center.

• Galileo Galilei 15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642

Polymath who championed Copernican heliocentrism against the Catholic Church. Galileo has been called the father of observational astronomy, modern-era classical physics, the scientific method, and modern science.

• William Gilbert 24 May 1544 – 30 November 1603

Gilbert - the father of electricity and magnetism -was an early advocate of the experimental method. He passionately rejected both the prevailing Aristotelian philosophy and the scholastic method of university teaching.

• Francis Bacon 22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626

Bacon has been called the father of empiricism. His works argued for the possibility of scientific knowledge based only upon inductive reasoning and careful observation of events in nature. Most importantly, he argued this could be achieved by use of a sceptical and methodical approach whereby scientists aim to avoid misleading themselves.

• Thomas Hobbes 5 April 1588 – 20 December 1679

His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory.

• John Locke 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704

Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin for modern conceptions of identity and "the self", figuring prominently in the later works of philosophers such as David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Locke was the first philosopher to define the self through a continuity of "consciousness." He also postulated that the mind was a "blank slate" or "tabula rasa"; that is, contrary to Cartesian or Christian philosophy, Locke maintained that people are born without innate ideas

• David Hume 26 April 1711 – 25 August 1776

Against philosophical rationalists, Hume held that passion rather than reason governs human behaviour and argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge is ultimately founded solely in experience

• Isaac Newton 25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726/27

An English polymath whose pioneering book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), first published in 1687 formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation which dominated scientists' view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for developing infinitesimal calculus, though he developed calculus years before Leibniz. He is considered one of the greatest and most influential scientists in history.

Resources:

• Gribbin, John: The Fellowship: Gilbert, Bacon, Wren, Newton, and the Story of a Scientific Revolution Penguin Books, 2005 p4
• Wikipedia